Month: April 2009

A Victory On State Secrets

by dday

Russ Feingold released a rule of law report card today, judging the Administration’s efforts in restoring core Constitutional principles about justice and executive power. Feingold gave Obama generally good marks, but saved his greatest ire for the Administration’s continuing use of the state secrets privilege.

Recommendation (State Secrets): “The new administration should conduct a review of pending cases in which the state secrets privilege has been invoked to assess whether the invocation was proper. It should also support legislative efforts, such as the State Secrets Protection Act (S. 2533/H.R. 5607), to allow more meaningful judicial scrutiny when the privilege is invoked.”

Action: The Obama administration has invoked the state secrets privilege in three cases in the first 100 days — Al Haramain Islamic Foundation v. Obama, Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, and Jewel v. NSA.

In Al Haramain, the Obama administration reinvoked the privilege in a case originally filed against the Bush administration in which the Al Haramain foundation, whose American branch is based on Oregon, alleged that the Bush administration authorized warrantless wiretaps. In Mohammed v. Jeppesen Dataplan, five individuals once held at Guantanamo Bay prison are accusing Jeppesen Dataplan, a subsidiary of Boeing, of providing logistical support for their “extraordinary rendition” to a foreign country where they were allegedly tortured. In Jewel v. NSA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation is suing the National Security Agency on behalf of AT&T customers for alleged illegal wiretapping surveillance. After Congress granted retroactive immunity to the telecom companies that allegedly participated in the Bush administration’s warrantless wiretapping program, cases in which the government is the defendant are the only legal avenues remaining to potentially test the legality of that program.

Senator Feingold has joined Senators Patrick Leahy, Arlen Specter, Edward Kennedy and others in introducing the State Secrets Protection Act, a bill to provide guidance to federal courts considering cases in which the government has asserted the state secrets privilege. The Obama administration has yet to take a position on the legislation.

Attorney General Holder has indicated that a complete review of all cases in which the state secrets privilege was asserted by the Bush administration is under way and that he hopes to make the result of that review public. Only the glimmer of hope offered by that ongoing review saves the Obama administration from a failing grade on this recommendation.

Today, the 9th Circuit appellate court agreed with Feingold and dealt a rebuke to the efforts to circumvent the rule of law by putting executive power grabs, in this case the Bush Administration’s extraordinary rendition program in the Jeppesen case, behind a state secrets firewall:

Today, in a 26-page ruling (.pdf), the appellate court resoundingly rejected the Bush/Obama position, holding that the “state secrets” privilege — except in extremely rare circumstances not applicable here — does not entitle the Government to demand dismissal of an entire lawsuit based on the assertion that the “subject matter” of the lawsuit is a state secret. Instead, the privilege only allows the Government to make specific claims of secrecy with regard to specific documents and other facts — exactly how the privilege was virtually always used before the Bush and Obama DOJs sought to expand it into a vast weapon of immunity from all lawsuits challenging the legality of any executive branch program relating to national security.

In rejecting this radical secrecy theory, the court emphasized how the Bush/Obama doctrine, if accepted, would essentially place the President above and beyond the rule of law.

The court wrote, “According to the government’s theory, the Judiciary should effectively cordon off all secret government actions from judicial scrutiny, immunizing the CIA and its partners from the demands of the limits of the law.” And this, basically, is where the “look forward but not backward” construction totally breaks down. The law requires scrutiny into official actions taken by the government and puts no limits on them for the sake of comity or bipartisanship. The law sees no Democrat or Republican, only the contours of the law. That was true when George W. Bush said that “In our country, when there’s an allegation of abuse … there will be a full investigation, and justice will be delivered,” and that “War crimes will be prosecuted, war criminals will be punished and it will be no defense to say, ‘I was just following orders,'” and it’s just as true today. The power of the state secrets privilege is the power to subvert the belief that no one is above the law by offering the executive branch a tool to block investigation by the other two branches. It is the tool of a cover-up and enables the rampant abuse and lawbreaking that can then be papered over.

The Obama DoJ appealed the ruling on Bagram detainees’ habeas rights, and will probably appeal this ruling as well, and we will have to await the ruling of the Supreme Court before determining whether or not we have fully eliminated the most dangerous aspects of the state secrets privilege, or at least the passage of the State Secrets Protection Act by Feingold, America’s Next Top Democrat Arlen Specter and the Congress. But as Glenn notes:

…in the meantime, the case will return to the District Court for a document-by-document assessment of what is and is not truly “secret” (and the court today held that a mere decision by the President to classify certain documents is insufficient; the court is required to exercise independent judgment as to whether secrecy is truly warranted). Finally, these 5 torture victims will have their day in court.

And hopefully, not just the victims but the perpetrators will have their day in court as well.

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Public Service Announcement

by digby

Always read Tom Tomorrow.

That is all.

Memory Lane

by dday

I’m old enough to remember George Bush and Rick Santorum being Arlen Specter’s biggest fan. In other words, I’m more than 5 years old.

The recent history of these things is that the party-switcher ends up landing in the mainstream of his new party. But in Specter’s case, with the Democratic Party already coalescing around him and asking for little in return, that may not be so. In his press conference, Specter said he would retain seniority inside the Democratic Party and would therefore be likely to possibly earn a committee chairmanship in the next Congress. Harry Reid seems to have given up way too much to earn Specter’s place in the caucus, considering that he was a goner if they refused. He also announced that he would oppose President Obama’s nominee for the Office of Legal Counsel, Dawn Johnsen. He may have an emphasis on some other issues, but basically he’s going to be the same, probably demanding certain changes on key legislation to befit his moderate heart before invoking cloture. For instance, he may have to make some grand compromise on Employee Free Choice in order to show his bona fides to labor and a Democratic primary electorate. But whether he guts legislation from the Republican or Democratic side of the aisle, Washington will continue to revere him. Hell, Obama said today he’d campaign for him.

For his part, Rep. Joe Sestak said he’d still entertain a primary if Specter doesn’t hew his views closer to the Democratic Party. Good for him, though he’ll have lots of pressure to stay out.

…I just threw up.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (Democrat-turned-Independent Democrat, Connecticut) put out this statement welcoming Sen. Arlen Specter (Republican-turned-Democrat, Pennsylvania) to the Dem caucus:

“I enthusiastically welcome my good friend Arlen Specter into the Democratic caucus. It will be very good to have the company of yet another independent minded Democrat in the caucus!

“I have always admired Arlen as a man of deep principle who has been a bridge builder to get things done in the Senate. Arlen understands that we get things accomplished when we listen to the vital center of American politics. I know that Arlen will continue to make a major contribution to the Senate and the nation as an effective independent leader and problem solver.”

…On the bright side, it is fun to watch Republicans go insane at this news.

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Welcome To Our New Overlord

by digby

I’m sure you have heard that Snarlin’ Arlen has just become the most powerful man in the world. (Ben Nelson must be hurting today.) I’m sure he would have preferred to join the Lieberman for Connecticut Party, but Pennsylvania seems to want a Democrat, se we’re stuck with him.

This is not uncommon when there’s been a big turnover election. That’s how the Democrats finally got rid of Richard Shelby back in 94. If there were more sane Republicans we’d probably see some others. It’s a testament to their solidarity with Rush that they are sticking.

If you want to enjoy this watch Fox news. They all look like they’ve just sucked on a bag of lemons.

Update: Republican leader Limbaugh had this to say today, from Simon at Limbaughwire:

After briefly downplaying the concerns about swine flu, Rush kicked off today’s program by noting that Sen. Arlen Specter will announce today his switch from (R-PA) to (D-PA). Rush counseled Specter to take Sen. John McCain (R-AZ) and his daughter, Meghan, with him, and then pondered who else in the Senate should make the switch. The only other name he tossed out was Sam Brownback (R-KS). That struck us as… odd, seeing as when Brownback ran for president last year, Republicans “fear[ed] he may be too conservative to win a national election.” Brownback’s sin, it seems, was voicing support for Kansas Gov. Kathleen Sebelius — who, according to Rush, is “for every abortion that ever happened” — as Health and Human Services secretary.

Update II: When asked on CNN about whether or not the Republicans regret taking out the pandemic money in the stimulus, Michael Steele said “we didn’t know there was going to be a flu pandemic! You can’t make that link!”

He added,

The American people don’t want there to be pointing fingers where you don’t have people in place or you vogted against the money. What you want to say is “what does the Administration going to do about it now? You cannot, in my view, make this blanket, after the fact, oh gee we should have voted for this money. See, but that had nothing to do with c`reating the jobs six months ago when this whole crisis situation was really kicking off. This bill was supposed to be twoard giving the small business owner who was about t ogo our of business a fighting chance to survive and it has nothing to do with some of the other things that we’re now looking at, so I’m not going to sit here and accept that connection. Is the money there? Yeah, the money would have been there whether the congress voted for it six months ago or not because we have an emergency situation and as in all cases, congress will find a way to fund the needs of the people at the time of the crisis situation.

Kira Phillips: Well, I think that’s the bottom line Chairman, is that why do voters have to wait until it becomes a crisis. I think voters just want to know whether it’s a pandemic, whether it’s flooding in New Orleans, whether it’s ..

Steele: Absolutely. but it’s the priorities, it’s the priorities. And at the time the priorities was stabilizing the economy and creating jobs. now the priority is dealing with what is potentially a very serious health issue. The government and elected officials have a responsibility to to step up and help the states work through this thing. So it’s a matter of priorities.

And tomorrow, a week from now, three weeks from now, three months from now, the priority might be something different because we don’t know what tomorrow holds, we can only deal with the here and now. And that’s what we were dealing with when these spending bills were put before the congress and Republicans made a legitimate argument that the trillions of dollars that were being spent had very little to do with job creation and wealth preservation and everything to do with a checklist of spending that Democrats wanted to work their way through.

And one of those items on the check list was preparing for a pandemic. Which we are now possibly facing and which the Republicans didn’t think was important enough to spend money on because it wasn’t a priority.

They can only live in the here and now. But then we already knew that planning wasn’t their strong suit. (See: Iraq occupation)

These Republicans are making the Dems look like disciplined, mature adults by comparison.

We Can’t Have People With Personal Experience Giving Their Opinion

by dday

From dumb as a stump and proud of it Brian Kilmeade on his radio show:

ANDREW NAPOLITANO (co-host): You may not know the name unless you live in California. Jay Bybee was a professional researcher for the Justice Department when he authored the principal of — the main one — of the torture memos.

President Bush awarded him by appointing him to the United States Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit. That’s the level of appellate court just below the Supreme Court. He was appointed to the 9th Circuit, which covers the western third of the United States.

There’s a lot of pressure on Jay Bybee — on Judge Bybee, now, because these memoranda, which obviously were not known about under — during the time of his confirmation came — came out.

Here’s what John McCain had to say about it yesterday.

JOHN McCAIN : A resignation would be a decision he would have to make on his own, but he falls into the same category as everybody else as far as giving very bad advice and misinterpreting fundamentally what the United States is all about, much less things like the Geneva Conventions.

Plus, under President Reagan, we signed a agreement against torture. We’re in violation of that.

BRIAN KILMEADE (co-host): Oh, come on. Number one, we all know John McCain is not a lawyer; this guy is. Number two, Judge, you knew at that time, this is —

NAPOLITANO: This is your guy, John McCain.

UNIDENTIFIED MALE: Now, now. Come on.

KILMEADE: No, he’s not my guy. I like John McCain. I respect him. But there’s a lot of issues I don’t understand. Plus, he should not be allowed to talk on torture because he is clearly somebody who went through unspeakable pain and punishment —

NAPOLITANO: You mean, he shouldn’t be allowed to talk — he has an opinion like everybody else. He represents the state of Arizona.

KILMEADE: But he was tortured. He was tortured. And —

NAPOLITANO: Therefore, his views on torture are —

KILMEADE: — are skewed.

NAPOLITANO: — irrelevant because of what happened —

KILMEADE: — are skewed.

NAPOLITANO: — in ‘nam? I think his views are particularly telling because he’s been through this kind of thing.

KILMEADE: But what do you think he’s going to be — pro-torture —

NAPOLITANO: No.

KILMEADE: — after he’s been through it?

NAPOLITANO: Of course, he’s not going to be pro-torture.

KILMEADE: And plus, I don’t think this is torture. And they don’t subscribe to the Geneva Conventions. We had this debate in 2002. You were on our set — you were on constantly saying, “Look, they don’t — right — the way the courts look at it right now, they do not fall under the Geneva Conventions.” And that was what they were going under.

NAPOLITANO: I never said they didn’t fall under the Geneva Conventions.

I should just submit this without comment, because it speaks for itself. But allow me a word on this. Kilmeade’s belief that nobody should be allowed to have an opinion backed up with experience or knowledge tracks perfectly with the conservative movement, on a variety of subjects. We shouldn’t listen to scientists on climate change, or health professionals on health care, or weapons inspectors on Iraq. The plural of data is not anecdote. Nobody with an informed opinion can possibly be dispassionate. Reality has a well-known liberal bias. This is simply a distilled form of that worldview.

The bigger problem lies in treating torture like it’s a debate, complete with polls. The moment a debate over torture was engaged was the moment that America lost its moral authority. Obviously it’s ridiculous to seriously state that anyone who has been tortured can’t be part of a debate over torture. But it’s just as ridiculous to have the debate at all, a debate over an issue that has been not only self-evident, but ingrained in the standard codes of law in civilized societies for centuries. We can open the subject again, but at that point we do lose the right to call ourselves civilized.

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Republicans Court The Important Wifebeaters Vote

by tristero

And I’ll bet you thought I was kidding:

Days from the end of the legislative session, Florida lawmakers have refused to move a bill to expand unemployment eligibility in order to accept $444 million in federal stimulus aid.

While the Republican-controlled Legislature plans to use as much as $5 billion from the stimulus package to balance the budget, lawmakers balked at moving the unemployment insurance bill out of committee…

The state’s unemployment trust fund is expected to run out of money in August. State officials plan to ask for a federal loan for the fund, and the Legislature is moving ahead with a bill that would increase unemployment taxes on businesses.

Lawmakers are expected to pass a measure that would allow them to use $700 million in stimulus money to extend unemployment benefits for the rest of the year to 250,000 people whose benefits would otherwise expire. But they have been unwilling to make more changes, like offering benefits to those who left work because of domestic violence or the relocation of a spouse.

The Republican Party – defending the right to beat your wife.

What Would Ronnie Do?

by digby

Oh my. Reagan’s DOJ Prosecuted Texas Sheriff For Waterboarding Prisoners?

George W. Bush’s Justice Department said subjecting a person to the near drowning of waterboarding was not a crime and didn’t even cause pain, but Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department thought otherwise, prosecuting a Texas sheriff and three deputies for using the practice to get confessions.

Federal prosecutors secured a 10-year sentence against the sheriff and four years in prison for the deputies. But that 1983 case – which would seem to be directly on point for a legal analysis on waterboarding two decades later – was never mentioned in the four Bush administration opinions released last week.

The failure to cite the earlier waterboarding case and a half-dozen other precedents that dealt with torture is reportedly one of the critical findings of a Justice Department watchdog report that legal sources say faults former Bush administration lawyers – Jay Bybee, John Yoo and Steven Bradbury – for violating “professional standards.”

[…]

t the trial of the Texas sheriff, Assistant US Attorney Scott Woodward said the prisoners who were subjected to waterboarding were not “model citizens,” but they were still “victims” of torture.

“We make no bones about it. The victims of these crimes are criminals,” Woodward said, according to a copy of the trial transcript. One of the “victims” was Vernell Harkless, who was convicted of burglary in 1977.

Gregg Magee, a deputy sheriff who testified against Sheriff Parker and three of the deputies said he witnessed Harkless being handcuffed to a chair by Parker and then getting “the water treatment.”

“A towel was draped over his head,” Magee said, according to court documents. “He was pulled back in the chair and water was poured over the towel.”

Harkless said he thought he was “going to be strangled to death,” adding: “I couldn’t breathe.”

One of the defendants, Deputy Floyd Allen Baker, said during the trial that he thought torture to be an immoral act, but he was unaware that it was illegal. His attorneys cited the “Nuremberg defense,” that Baker was acting on orders from his superiors when he subjected prisoners to waterboarding.

That line of defense has come up in the current debate about whether CIA interrogators should be prosecuted for their roles in the torture of detainees. President Obama, CIA Director Leon Panetta and Attorney General Eric Holder have ruled out prosecuting CIA interrogators who acted on Justice Department legal advice.

Some other legal analysts have suggested that the ambiguity of the Bush administration’s decision process – in which CIA interrogators suggested the harsh tactics, national security officials, including Condoleezza Rice, concurred, and Justice Department lawyers gave their approval – would make getting 12 jurors to agree on a conviction difficult.

But the jury in the Baker’s case didn’t buy the “didn’t know it was illegal” defense, convicting the deputy on three counts of civil rights and constitutional violations related to the waterboarding.

The article above notes that Yoo, Bybee and Bradbury didn’t bother to cite that case — or others that pertained to this issue — which might have rendered their legal “advice” a little less positive.

Over the weekend, the Washington Post allowed his friends to anonymously plead that Bybee is a really good guy after all. One of them offered this:

“Jay would be the sort of lawyer who would say, ‘Look, I’ll give you the legal advice, but it’s up to someone else to make the policy decision whether you implement it,’ ” said Randall Guynn, who roomed with Bybee at Brigham Young University and remains close.

If that’s the case, it probably would have been helpful to at least cite all the cases that related to the issue, don’t you think? But then Bybee was only there to do his time until he could get his judgeship, so it would have been foolish for him not to deliver what the White House wanted. (We know what happened to those who didn’t deliver what the White House wanted, don’t we?)

Bybee’s friends said he never sought the job at the Office of Legal Counsel. The reason he went back to Washington, Guynn said, was to interview with then-White House counsel Alberto R. Gonzales for a slot that would be opening on the 9th Circuit when a judge retired. The opening was not yet there, however, so Gonzales asked, “Would you be willing to take a position at the OLC first?” Guynn said.

So, endorsing torture was just a career move for him. Perfectly understandable.

Some Behavior Is Beyond The Legal System

by digby

Yglesias asks the 64 trillion dollar question today:

The orthodox conservative position at this point, it seems to me, is that waterboarding is not torture. Nor is having someone dangle from his shackled arms in a manner so painful as to prevent sleep for a period of days. What’s more, these non-torturous “harsh techniques” are highly effective at gathering intelligence. But if that’s true, and these are legal and effective means of securing reliable information, why are we doing so little of it?

After all, people doing organized crime investigations face a lot of challenges in terms of getting information from people. Maybe cops should do routine undercover drug buys, build a case against low level dealers, and then waterboard the guys they’ve arrested and move further up the food chain. Maybe waterboarding and “stress positions” should become routine treatment for battlefield detainees in Iraq and Afghanistan. Why not?

Why not indeed? I’ve worried about the removal of the taboo against torture for years, which is one reason why I’m so appalled at the blithe acceptance of tasering. It’s always seemed to me that the logic that the president must do absolutely everything in its power to “protect the American people” leads inexorably to a rejection of the fundamental principles that underlie the Bill of Rights, which protects us all.

Back in ’06 I wrote a long winded screed , from which this passage is excerpted:

I keep thinking I’m going to wake from this awful dream in which law professors (and former deputy attorneys general) of the highest reputation do not make arguments like this (from the important article by Jane Mayer in this week’s New Yorker called “Outsourcing Torture”):

In a recent phone interview, Yoo was soft-spoken and resolute. “Why is it so hard for people to understand that there is a category of behavior not covered by the legal system?”

What would that category of behavior be? Mass Murder? Torture? Genocide? Medical experimentation? Eviscerating babies with a bobby pin? No, those are all covered by criminal statutes and international law. So, it must be something worse than that, musn’t it? It must be worse than Hitler. It must be something so bad that Satan could only conceive of it. We call it “terrorism.”

I wonder when those in this country whose children were killed by a child molester like John Wayne Gacy or who were the victims of a brutal home invasion robbery or even a drunk driver might begin to wonder why the criminals who committed those crimes should should be allowed this “luxury” of due process when we can simply pluck terrorists off the street, inflict torture upon them and throw them in prison forever. That awful day on 9/11 was shocking, to be sure. But is it more shocking than Tim McVeigh or that woman who killed the pregnant woman and carved her baby out of her womb? An average person can be forgiven for wondering just why we must deal with warrants and grand juries and trials with our homegrown vicious killers when we don’t have to deal with such niceties with terrorists. Just what is the principle that guides this decision?

I’m truly wondering when someone will ask that question. Because when someone finally does we will begin to answer Professor Yoo’s startling question about whether there aren’t some things that fall outside the legal system.

The answer is, of course there aren’t. The reason, professor, is that the rules of due process were designed to ensure that the government cannot arbitrarily imprison innocent people. That principle is so basic and so clear cut that you wouldn’t think that a law professor would have to even think about it.

Even that ole puritan Increase Mather (Cotton’s daddy) spoke out on this after the Salem Witch trials saying, “It were better that 10 suspected witches should escape than one innocent person should be condemned.” Please don’t try to tell me that the Puritans in Massachusetts were any less assured that the Devil presented an existential threat than terrorism does today. These people lived in a stew of supernatural fear and they were able to work themselves out of hysteria enough to see that condemning innocent people was the worst evil of all.

As for torture, we can go all the way back to the English Bill of Rights in 1689 to find that civilization had evolved enough to outlaw cruel and unusual punishment. Certainly, if punishment that was cruel and unusual has been outlawed for more than 400 years, then cruel and unusual treatment of those who haven’t even been found guilty of a crime cannot be considered legal in the 21st century. How does one become a first tier legal scholar and not see the implications of what we are doing?

In the “war on terrorism” we are operating under a system in which Joe Bob Bumpkin from the Arkansas National Guard and Rambo McClean of Blackwater Consulting are serving as detective, prosecutor and judge when they “capture” a so-called terrorist. They then render the “convict” to a facility outside of American jurisdiction where they “interrogate” this convict for information about his fellow criminals — for years at a time. Then the convict might get a trial in a kangaroo court. We know, however, that even if found “innocent” they will likely not be released. Everyone agrees that these men are just too dangerous to be freed no matter what.

Unless, of course, an allied government like Britain puts the heat on and demands that their citizens be released, after which they are allowed to go home and are free to go back into society and live normally as before. Odd how that works isn’t it? It would seem that we are making some mistakes, since these men have been released — but we only know about it if a powerful ally demands it. Somehow, I don’t think that’s going to happen to the Afghans or any of the other citizens of middle eastern countries who, like us, don’t really give a damn if innocent people are tortured and imprisoned forever.

And, some believe that we Americans have now sanctioned this entire immoral regime:

Yoo also argued that the Constitution granted the President plenary powers to override the U.N. Convention Against Torture when he is acting in the nation’s defense—a position that has drawn dissent from many scholars. As Yoo saw it, Congress doesn’t have the power to “tie the President’s hands in regard to torture as an interrogation technique.” He continued, “It’s the core of the Commander-in-Chief function. They can’t prevent the President from ordering torture.” If the President were to abuse his powers as Commander-in-Chief, Yoo said, the constitutional remedy was impeachment. He went on to suggest that President Bush’s victory in the 2004 election, along with the relatively mild challenge to Gonzales mounted by the Democrats in Congress, was “proof that the debate is over.” He said, “The issue is dying out. The public has had its referendum.”

So, it is the very core of the Commander In Chief function to be above the law. And Americans are assumed to have approved this by electing George W. Bush to a second term. That’s what the president meant when he said, “We had an accountability moment, and that’s called the 2004 elections.”

[…]

We are disappearing people, rendering them to friendly governments that aren’t afraid to put the electrode to genitals and threaten with dog rape. And we are building our own infrastructure of torture and extra legal imprisonment. It is a law of human nature that if you build it, they will come. This infrastructure will be expanded and bureaucratized. It’s already happening. And when they decide, as Professor Yoo has already decided, that an election is a sanctioning of anything the President chooses to do in the War on Terror, it is only a matter of time before internal political enemies become a threat.

And then it will be us.

What legal or moral theory can possibly reconcile the idea that suspected serial killers can’t be tortured but terrorists can?

I know that hard core conservatives want to be able to torture anyone (except themselves or someone they know, of course, at which point they become huge believers in the bill of rights.) But how about all the other people who apparently think the government should consider the use of torture?

Do they also believe that the government should consider using torture on criminal suspects? Do they think Islamic terrorism is worse than Tim McVeigh’s terrorism? Or do they believe that Tim McVeigh should have been tortured too? Or Richard Jewel? Or these people, who were wrongly convicted of satanic ritual child molestation? Do they think the government always “just knows” who’s evil and should be waterboarded? After all, they thought this guy was involved with terrorism too. This one as well.

Once you decide that “some behavior is beyond the legal system” — and that the president has the singular power to decide which behaviors those are — you have pretty much nullified the guts of the Bill of Rights. John Yoo literally believed that the extent of the People’s power was to elect a dictator to four year terms. But that kind of thinking is why we have a Bill of Rights in the first place — to protect ourselves from people who think that way.

I hope for their sakes that none of these Americans who think that torture should be “considered” ever find themselves in the grips of the legal system because allowing the government to ignore the constitution and disregard moral taboos against cruelty and barbarity can only logically lead to the same tactics being used at home.

If there is no further investigation of this terrible breach of American values and constitutional principles and this philosophy is allowed to become a mainstream, respectable way of thinking, we will have gone a long way toward making ourselves an elected dictatorship subject to the good intentions of our leaders. Personally, I’m not crazy about that idea. I’ve lived long enough now to know that even the best cannot be trusted with such power.

Nothing To Say

by digby

In case you’re wondering what the head of the Republican Party thinks about the flu outbreak, here is his statement:

After the break, Rush attacked the UN for issuing a warning for a worldwide flu pandemic, claiming that it is “by design” to get people to respond to government orders. The media fall right in line with this stuff, Rush said, amplifying the nature of the crisis. Rush — in his capacity as public health expert — added that “the flu’s a common thing.”

This makes perfect sense. If you are a conservative you can’t believe that something like an epidemic or a pandemic could even exist or you would have to grant that the necessity for public health — a government function. Indeed, you even have to grant that a pandemic requires that people are going to be forced to behave in ways that explicitly explicitly define their own personal survival with the common good.

Rush is right to be a little bit nervous about this, though. Public health crises tend to focus the public on the usefulness of things like science, international cooperation, government coordination. You know, the sort of thing that liberals think are necessary. Something like that simply doesn’t fit into the conservative worldview. They see all problems and challenges in schoolyard terms of good guys and bad guys. This kind of challenge (like global warming) falls outside the paradigm by which they organize their world. Pandemics, like hurricanes, can’t be dealt with by using tough talk and threats. So, they are lost.

Relatively Appropriate

by digby

Bush’s former speechwriter Michael Gerson is known as a Christian political operative with a very high moral standing. He wrote some of George W. Bush’s most soaring, spiritual rhetoric. (They were usually the least believable words coming out of the man’s mouth, although that’s arguable.) Today, he says he was against torture until he read the most excellent Bybee and Bradbury memos which show how serious and thoughtful the decision was. He explains that the proper moral position on torture is that we really should try to avoid it but it’s probably going to be necessary at times just because. And it’s especially ok if we make sure that thoughtful, sober memos are written to secretly legalize it. And anyway using nuclear weapons and firebombing like we did in WWII was worse, so this is nothing.

And he also says this isn’t moral relativism. I’m very relieved. Because moral relativism is very bad. Or, at least, that’s what I’ve been told.

I just pray no fellatio was involved in the torture regime or there is going to be hell to pay.